How to enable Registry back up on Windows 10

Microsoft doesn’t announce all the changes it makes to Windows 10 when a major feature update is released. Some minor, and occasionally major changes aren’t mentioned at all and it isn’t until users go looking for a particular feature, item, or folder. Microsoft disabled registry back ups with the 1809 update and never mentioned it. The feature has been disable but not removed which means you can enable Registry back up on Windows 10 1809 and later. Here’s how.

Enable Registry back up

This solution comes via Deskmodder.de and requires that you edit the Windows registry as well as manually restart a task in Task Scheduler.

Use the Win+R keyboard shortcut to open the run box and type ‘regedit’ in it. Tap Enter.

In the registry editor, go to the following location.

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Configuration Manager\

Right-click the Configuration Manager key and select New>DWORD(32-bit) Value from the context menu. Give the value the following name, and set its value to 1.

EnablePeriodicBackup

After you add the value, you need to restart your system.

After restarting your system, open the Task Scheduler and go to Task Scheduler Library>Microsoft>Windows>Registry. Under the Registry folder, look for a task called RegIdleBackup. Check to see if it’s running. If it isn’t, right-click it and select Run from the context menu.

To check if the registry has successfully been backed up, open File Explorer and navigate to the following location.

C:\Windows\System32\config\RegBack

The task will run regularly but it is nevertheless a good idea to check up on it just in case.

Why has this been disabled?

A registry back up is exceptionally useful. If your system runs into problems, the registry back up can help restore it to a stable state. It is therefore mind boggling that Microsoft would turn it off. The reason the company has given for turning it off is that it was meant to save space.

It is unclear just how much space turning this feature off can save but a back up of my own registry was 134MB which isn’t much. There are images that are as big, if not bigger in size. Microsoft isn’t shy about reserving 3GB or more of storage space for updates to install but it has chosen to disable something that not only takes up a small amount of space but is also very useful. Even if you’re thinking of tablets that are generally low on disk space, this is hardly freeing up GBs worth of it.